


tabbycat style

by inlovewithnight



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 19:05:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7519708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holtzmann believes in showing her interest directly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tabbycat style

When Holtzmann was a kid, her family didn’t have pets, but there was a big cat who lived in their neighborhood and sort of adopted her. She named him Feynman and left cans of tuna on the back steps for him. In return, he left her little corpses. Mice, birds, chipmunks.

She looked it up and confirmed that he was doing it to show his love, not make some kind of threat about imminent evisceration. They kept up their little exchange until she left for college. She left an entire actual fish on the back steps that day, and a note saying she wouldn’t be back.

**

The current situation isn’t really the same. Erin Gilbert does not go around leaving cans of food for Holtz to scavenge. Still, Feynman’s simple and direct way of showing affection appeals to Holtz’s way of thinking on a lot of levels. It’s worth a shot, at least.

There’s a cupcakery not far from her apartment that throws away that turn out flattened or crooked, or get squished during the decorating process. Holtz checks the dumpsters on her way to the office for a week and finally snags a chocolate cupcake crowned in lemon buttercream with a candied violet on top. The combination sounds kind of nauseating. The whole thing is sort of squished at a 45-degree angle. It’s perfect for Gilbert.

Holtz leaves it on her desk, on top of the latest issue of _Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics_. Holtz doesn’t really believe in journals; she builds things. Write-ups are for lab assistants if you have them and to be forgotten about if you don’t. But Gilbert has a different approach. She’s a math and formulas scientist. Weird and boring, but somebody has to do it.

Holtz checks the issue number of the journal under the cupcake, then takes a picture of the row of previous issues on Gilbert’s shelves. Then she goes back to her workshop. She can’t sit around looking at books all day.

**

“Kevin, did you bring cupcakes?” Gilbert says when she gets in. Holtz can hear it through the pole-hole in the floor. She pauses in measuring out casing specs to listen.

“No.” From this angle, Holtz can just see Kevin downstairs, very calmly giving himself a manicure at the reception desk. “I’m off refined sugar.”

“Well, then where did this cupcake come from? And did somebody sit on it?”

Hotlz smiles and waves her ruler around in triumph. Day one: a success.

**

It takes two weeks of searching around university libraries before Holtz finds one that has double copies of the issues of _Physics Letters_ that Gilbert is missing. Holtz believes in fairness: she won’t deprive a library of their only copy, but if they have two, then it’s okay to take one in the interests of bringing Gilbert something more meaningful than a bird’s severed head. No disrespect to the memory of Feynman.

She lets herself back into the library after closing, wraps the shelves of journals in plastic, climbs the end of the shelf to hold a lighter under the sprinkler on the ceiling, and thoroughly douses the whole section in water and foam. Once it stops, she peels the plastic off again, puts the issues she needs in her bag, and carefully disarranges all the others. It needs to look like chaos, so everyone panics about the journals being damaged without realizing that none of them actually _are_ damaged. Or that some of them are missing.

She rappels down from a window to the courtyard to make her exit, with a knife between her teeth. Not because she couldn’t just let herself back out the same door she came in, but because she’s always wanted to try that.

**

She leaves the journals stacked neatly on Gilbert’s chair and puts a post-it note on top with a smiley face drawn on it.

That backfires a little, since Gilbert is convinced a ghost did it, and they all end up wasting an entire day checking the fire station’s energy readings and researching who might have died there and stuck around for some haunting over the years.

So day two is a mixed bag. Holtz considers it a win overall, but she’ll need to take more care in the future.

**

The problem is that apparently Feynman was way more patient than Holtz is. She’s kind of out of ideas, and bored with this game already, and Gilbert seems to be making absolutely zero progress toward figuring it out.

Holtz stews on it for three days before she leaves a dental dam and a mini bottle of tequila on Gilbert’s desk, with a note reading _To Dr. Gilbert, please catch a clue already, xo tongue emoji, Dr. Holtzmann._

(She draws the tongue emoji, but then labels it, because Gilbert might not know what an emoji is. It’s hard to be sure, and Holtz is tired of subtlety.)

**

“This is really inappropriate for the workplace,” Gilbert says, waving the note in Holtz’s face. Holtz’s face is about three inches from a circuit board she’s soldering in place, so that’s inconvenient.

She will attempt blind soldering in the interest of playing it cool, though. “Did you bring the tequila and el prophylactico?”

Gilbert stills, frowning a little. “Is that the right word? I thought a prophylactic was just for preventing pregnancy.”

Holtz looks up at Gilbert over her goggles, which is a complicated eye arrangement to manage, but she’s been practicing for years. “That’s not a problem here.”

“Obviously.” Gilbert huffs a little and waves the note at her again. “Still not appropriate for the workplace.”

“I promise, I was gonna take you back to my place.” She gives up on soldering and sits back on her heels. “I’ll treat you like a lady, Gilbert. Don’t worry.”

Gilbert looks at her for a long minute, then folds up the note and tucks it in her pocket. “That tequila is mine, if you expect to have any you’ll need to bring your own bottle.”

“That can be arranged.”

“And I hope you have some more of the… prophylacticos.”

“Swimming in ‘em.”

“Good.” Gilbert nods. “Then I’ll see you after work.”

Holtz grins and bumps her goggles higher on her nose. “Should I get you flowers?”

Day three double-success: Gilbert smiles. “No, but if you can track down a copy of the _Journal of Synchrotron Radiation_ volume 19 part 2, Kevin spilled coffee on mine this morning.”

“On it. You want that intact or folded into origami flowers?”

The smile drops away into a look of horror. “Intact, Holtzmann! God, don’t even joke about that!”

She’s so cute and uptight. Holtz can’t wait to rock her world.


End file.
